Ask Semalt How To Win The Fight Against Darodar Referral Spam

It is important to block darodar.com referral spam in your Google Analytics before it’s too late and the fake traffic that a bad guy spoofs to your account decreases your search engine rank. The best option is to create hostname filters in your Google Analytics. Fortunately, Google has provided us with lots of helpful tips and tutorials about how to create pre-defined filters to exclude darodar.com referral traffic from your account. If you noticed some strange referral links in the Google Analytics reports that redirect you to the affiliate links of eBay.com and Amazon.com, let us tell you that a Russian fraudster collected a bunch of Google Analytics tracking IDs and included malware in all of them. There are chances that your website is receiving malicious traffic because he has identified your tracking ID too.

Oliver King, the Semalt Customer Success Manager, explains that this Russian guy uses all of those IDs to ping Google Analytics without even viewing your web pages. Moreover, he, sends a particular URL for the referrer, trying to trick your Google Analytics. You will see that URL in your website, and it will redirect you to an affiliate link that bad guy has left behind. Most often, Amazon and Alibaba are used as the affiliate links, but the bad guy has embedded a lot of affiliate links and redirected the users in the hope to sell his products on the internet and to get some commission. Most of the merchant websites restore the affiliate IDs in the cookies for a few days, and the bad guys keep earning money through your site.

1. Some people will ask you to change the .htaccess file on your site, but this is good for nothing as the bad guy is not going to visit your website.

2. It does not affect your site, so you should not worry about it. Instead, it will affect your analytics report, and the bounce rate might be increased.

3. The referral URLs will have your Google Analytics Tracking ID. This Russian guy will determine who is visiting the referral URLs before redirecting them to his affiliate links.

4. The first Property in your Google Analytics account will be hit now and then — the Property with your Tracking ID will end with the letter “I.”

5. The affiliate IDs are stored in cookies, creating no problems for your computer or your website. But it will reward that bad guy concerning commissions and advance payments.

6. For new and basic sites, you should block the spam using predefined hostname filters in your Google Analytics.

Website referral spam has been one of the major problems and is a form of artificial traffic that ruins a site’s ranking on the internet. You should bear in mind that no humans are visiting your website. Instead, the darodar.com referral spam visits your site, creates impressions and gets those hits recorded in the Google Analytics account. So, if you ever notice a spike in the referral traffic of your analytics account, you might be interested in creating filters or changing the .htaccess file’s settings. This will prevent the bad guy from redirecting your visitors to his own commission-based websites.